Venetia Burney

Venetia Burney was the eleven-year-old English girl who named a world. Born in 1918 in Banstead, Surrey, she was at breakfast on a March morning in 1930 when she overheard her grandfather speaking of a newly discovered body beyond Neptune. Steeped already in Roman myth, she offered the name Pluto, god of the cold and distant underworld. Her grandfather, a former Bodleian librarian, passed the idea along, her father carried it to the Oxford astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, and Turner sent it on to the Lowell Observatory. On the 1st of May 1930 her suggestion became official, its initials PL quietly honouring Percival Lowell. She grew up to teach and to keep accounts, living to ninety, her small act of imagination forever woven into astronomical history.

Her Sun in Cancer is the tender, intuitive luminary of home, family and the imaginative inner world, the child who was the apple of her mother's eye, guarding a soft and feeling heart within its shell. Her Moon in Leo gave that gentle nature a spark of the stage, a warm and dramatic imagination, king and queen in one, the born storyteller in a young girl who reached for a myth and, generous of heart, gave the ninth planet its enduring name.